The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Databases are used to store representations of real-life objects. These representations often incorporate names and descriptions and attempt to accurately—but in simplified form—capture the characteristics and essences of their real-life counterparts. Many databases go one step further and incorporate a scheme with which to capture relationships between the representations that they contain.
In many fields, it becomes necessary to access data stretched across multiple databases that overlap substantially. These fields include the medical practice and research, historical research, general master data management fields, and many other more that require organizing large quantities of data over multiple structures and databases.
Unfortunately, representations of the same real-life object in two different databases are often not the same. When these databases are compared or when they are to be used together, it is difficult to immediately discern if two representations do in fact refer to the same real-life object. While simply checking the names of each representation will suffice in some circumstances, the problem grows increasingly difficult when each database chooses to use a different naming convention for its own representations, such as using for acronyms or synonyms rather than a formal full name.
As a result, other means are employed—for example, a comparison against a previously, and often manually, generated table of alternate names or a comparison of the properties of each representation. However even a comparison of the properties themselves face similar problem—for example, where one property may be termed “state,” another may use the term “province,” and yet another “territory.” To address this, yet another table of alternative names will have to be created to improve accuracy. Ultimately the process is no more convenient than having an end-user simply compare representations and identify matches manually. Thus, there is a need for improved computer functionality that can identify data elements or data representations that match; in this context, a match of two items means that the items map to the same object.